A rail-borne piezoelectric transducer for energy harvesting of railway vibration

This paper investigates design, modelling, and test issues related to piezoelectric energy transducer. The model analyzes a rail-borne “seismic” energy harvester that is designed to generate electrical energy from local variations in rail acceleration. The energy harvester analyzed in this model consists of a piezoelectric PZT film clamped at one end to the rail with a tip mass mounted on its other end. It includes two sub-models in this paper: a vehicle-track interaction model considering vehicle travelling load; and a cantilevered piezoelectric beam model for the visualization of voltage and power profile and frequency response. Four rail irregularities (American 6th grade track spectrum, Chinese track spectrum, German high and low-disturbance track spectrum) are compared and implemented into the calculation script. The calculated results indicate a rail displacement of 0.2 mm to 0.8 mm. Vibration tests of the proposed rail-borne device are conducted; a hydraulic driven system with excitation force up to 140 kN is exploited to generate the realistic wheel-rail interaction force. The proposed rail-borne energy harvester is capable of energy harvesting at low-frequency (5 Hz to 7 Hz) and small railway vibration (0.2 mm to 0.4 mm rail displacement). The output power of 4.9 mW with a load impedance of 100 kOhm is achieved. The open circuit peak-peak voltage reaches 24.4 V at 0.2 mm/7 Hz/5 g wheel-rail excitation. A DC-DC buck converter is designed, which works at the resonance frequency of 23 Hz/5 g on a lab vibration rig, providing a 3.3 VDC output.